TRAVEL GADGETS:EVER WONDER HOW best to arm yourself with information while travelling? Satnav? iPhone? BlackBerry? The answer might be none of the above. Condé Nast Traveler magazine sent three writers to Moscow, two of them with electronic devices and the third with an old-fashioned guidebook. They were asked to find a hotel, restaurant, bar, attractions and pharmacy.
The writer armed with the guidebook completed most of the tasks more quickly and easily than the writers with gadgets. The hotel concierge and the kindness of strangers were also reliable, she wrote.
The writer using a BlackBerry Bold praised the Beiks Talking English-Russian Phrase Book, which let an automated voice speak for him when asking directions from passers-by. “The clumsy manoeuvre earned plenty of laughs but nearly always got me where I needed to go and often led to interesting conversations,” he wrote.
But in the end the girl with the guidebook won five of the magazine’s nine challenges, including finding a hotel for less than $300 a night (45 minutes against two hours for the BlackBerry user and more than three hours for the iPhone man); finding an affordable restaurant loved by locals (five minutes against a complete failure by the BlackBerry user, whose battery was dead, and 45 minutes for the iPhone guy); and taking the subway to a bazaar in search of a craft (90 minutes; the BlackBerry user could not complete the task, and the iPhone user took three hours).